the big challenges is just making time for teachers to participate in any type of quality professional development,
It’s another thing if you’re part of a professional development experience that essentially challenges you to rethink your pedagogy, your content, and your assessments, and that expects you to go try some things in your classroom and reflect on how well they went, and then come back and discuss them with a community of other teachers doing similar things.
online teacher professional development that includes an asynchronous component helps with that kind of reflection.
online learning environments actually led to higher tested performance than face-to-face learning environments.
It was the combination of elements in the treatment conditions
No longer is online learning just reading a module and answering questions — it can now include synchronous or asynchronous discussions and peer-to-peer learning exercises.
The major difference between teachers of today and teachers of the future is that in the future educators will have better online tools and will require better specialized training to learn how to utilize them properly.
‘relying on the technology to do the teaching for you; thinking that a new tool will substitute for engagement and interest in your students.’
The teacher or lecturer who uses Twitter or Facebook or Bebo or whatever as a medium for the sharing of ideas, discussion, assignments and so on with his or her students risks being perceived as intruding on students’ personal and social territories.
We should start, where we can, with the core purpose of education,
A good educational system should have three purposes: it should
When a new technology appears, our first instinct is always to continue doing things within the technology the way we've always done it.
It appears that students who write on a computer turn in longer and higher-quality assignments than those who compose by hand, even though it's still writing.
But new technology still faces a great deal of resistance.
(clothes, supplies, and even homework) on eBay and the Internet; exchanging music on P2P sites; building games with modding (modifying) tools; setting up meetings and dates online; posting personal information and creations for others to check out; meeting people through cell phones; building libraries of music and movies; working together in self-formed teams in multiplayer online role-playing games; creating and using online reputation systems; peer rating of comments; online gaming; screen saver analysis; photoblogging; programming; exploring; and even transgressing and testing social norms.